Before the federal election, the NSW/ACT Synod of the Uniting Church held a Service of Lament at the Pitt Street Uniting Church in the city. Even at very short notice, several hundred people turned up to grieve our refugee policies.
Our Moderator began the service by saying:
We are here to ask, “What has become of us?”, and to seek forgiveness for our hardness of heart. We trust that through confession, repentance and intercession we might find a new way forward, one that honours the divine commandments to love God, and our neighbour as ourselves; also to observe the golden rule to do to others as we would have them do to us.
Then the liturgy began:
As we gather here,
we acknowledge the Traditional Owners of this land,
the Gadigal People of the Eora Nation.
We give our respect to their Elders, past and present:
And we own that we took their land,
without their permission.
Some of our forebears were forced here, as convicts.
Some came as soldiers and settlers
and others as refugee boat people of an earlier time.
Some simply came because they chose to live here,
seeking a better life for themselves and their families.
We are gathered here today
to look our history in the face and lament our present day.
Many of us cried, as those leading quoted from the refugee policies of our day and we listened to the sounds of despair that must inevitably arise from them. In the silent reflection that followed, we faced the reality of who we have become as a nation.
Then we affirmed our faith together:
We are all held in the hollow of God’s hand,
loved children of the universe,
born from the life which flows from God,
freed to the fullness of God’s creation
with all its beauty and variety.
We are all worth dying for in Christ Jesus,
and called to risen life in Christ’s rising.
The way of Jesus gives us footprints for our following
and our trials and longings are known
in the vulnerability of Christ’s birth among us
and the courage of Christ’s walking before us.
We are called to new things in the Spirit,
in the hope that stirs in unlikely moments,
the truths we find in the wastelands of our wanderings,
the warmth that we touch in the coldness of our need
and the opening of our hearts
to welcome those without a home.
Then we prayed for those in need:
As they face this day, O God,
may we find those who are lost,
separated from those they love,
crossing unknown borders,
without a country or home,
not knowing where to turn.
Find them, God who always seeks for the lost,
and open our hearts to receive them.
As they face this day, O God,
stand among the ones in refugee camps around the world,
in the hunger and despair,
in the crowds and the emptiness,
in the wet and the thirstiness:
Be their hope and their strength
in the crying out for justice, O God,
and open our ears to hear their cries.
As we think of those desperate people
who come to our shores
or wait in despair in refugee detention centres:
we long to be true to your calling
and to know how best
to love our neighbours as ourselves.
Hear us as we cry out to you, O God.
And give us a voice for those who suffer.
This we pray in Christ’s name.
Amen.
This was the response of one community of faith to the policies of our country. We have no doubt that people of other denominations and faiths would probably join us in what we expressed.
Maybe we can find a new voice together as we move into the future, so that our political leaders not only stop inviting meanness in us but live out justice and compassion in our name.
